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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27112130">Sing to Me with New Belief</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneoneandone/pseuds/oneoneandone'>oneoneandone</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Women's Soccer RPF</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:02:43</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,884</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27112130</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneoneandone/pseuds/oneoneandone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a bad, bad break, baby.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kelley O'Hara/Hope Solo</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Sing to Me with New Belief</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <b>Prompt</b>
  <br/>
  <i>Hope gets hurt in a game really badly and the team is worried. Team feels plus can be any pairing</i>
</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The whole stadium is silent. The team, the crowd. Twenty-thousand people holding their breath as the bodies part in the box, make way for the trainers already rushing over.</p><p>Hope pounds at the ground with her fist, and the camera cuts away before her tears can take center stage on the giant screen at the other end of the field, the televisions of all those watching from home, from bars, on tablets and phones and browser windows that can easily be hidden away with a few quick keystrokes.</p><p>“Tell me what’s up, Hope,” Jim, the familiar old trainer says as he kneels by her side, and it’s exactly the same phrase he’s said to her a thousand times before, a hundred thousand. But the tone—</p><p>His tone is different. And Hope can’t speak just yet to answer him, pain rippling out from her thigh, seeming to travel through her body, settling into her bones. She knows—even if she manages to get off the field under her own power, she won’t be coming back on.</p><p>The forward who’d collided with her—a twentysomething looking to make her first goal on Hope’s field—shakes off the sting of their contact and rises, taking the bottle a teammate offers her and dousing her head with the ice cold water as she laughs under the hot afternoon sun. And Hope closes her eyes as she hears the angry words her own teammates are having with the head ref just a few feet away. She can’t quite make out the words, not amid the cacophony of other sounds—teammates, opponents, coaches, the crowd beyond. She could swear she can even hear the way the scorching rays of sun beat down against the green, green grass, the blue sky above with nary a cloud to mar its breadth. And—</p><p>The medics jostle her leg and she’s brought hurtling back to the present, the pain spreading like fire as they try to straighten it out, as carefully, as gently as possible. But there is no level of careful that won’t send hot knives of unimaginable pain through her body, and Hope can no longer swallow back the cry that slips past her lips, clenching tightly at the grass—something to ground her, to keep her mind from floating off again.</p><p>“Okay, Hope,” Jim says, very, very softly. “We’re going to move you onto the stretcher now that we’ve got your leg stabilized—”</p><p>She tries to look, and finds that she can’t move her head very much, only just enough to see the bubble cast there, and wonders just how long she was daydreaming, how long her mind had been wandering, trying to distract her from the presentness of the pain, before shaking her head, stopping it from happening again.</p><p>“What—” Hope tries to ask after they’ve rolled her onto the stretcher, but the voice doesn’t sound like her voice, the words sound wet, thick with tears. And she sees Jim open his mouth to answer, but before he can there’s a cool hand over her cheek, and then another.</p><p>Kelley, standing there over her in street clothes, when Hope is pretty sure that she’d been dressed for the game earlier. How long has she been laying here, tear tracks drying on her face, staring up at the sky?</p><p>Kelley’s face is upside down, and the goalkeeper scrunches her nose, trying to make sense of it. But all she can manage to focus on is the feel of the younger woman’s hands on her face, gentle and soothing and reassuring.</p><p>“The game?” Hope asks, as she feels herself lifted, shivering a little now as the searing heat of pain has begun to dissipate, and it’s not clear what she’s asking about exactly. Not to herself and not to Kelley either, but the brunette smiles sweetly down at her, even though the worry is still there, the fear.</p><p>“There’s gonna be a new stoppage time record,” Kelley’s head bounces above her own, somewhere deep inside her mind, Hope realizes that she must be jogging after them, the stretcher and the trainers, the EMTs she’s only really just noticed. “And I’m pretty sure that that kid will never try to take on a goalkeeper again, not with the way Carli ripped into her. Your buddy almost got a red card herself,” and there’s amusement there in Kelley’s voice, and Hope knows it’s there for her. To help her feel a little less afraid, the image of Carli dressing down a reckless kid just trying to make a name for herself settling into her mind.</p><p>The jostling stops and Hope realizes that her entourage has reached the ambulance waiting on the sidelines for just this sort of incident. And finally, after they lift her up and strap the gurney into place, she can see Kelley properly, as the younger woman follows the EMT into cab of the emergency services vehicle and settles out of the way but close enough that Hope can see her at the very margins of her vision.</p><p>The EMT is saying something into the walkie-talkie clipped to his shirt, numbers and phrases that Hope doesn’t understand, and she stops trying to pay attention, focusing instead on the worried hazel eyes looking down at her. She’s feeling like she just wants to close her own, to drift off a little, but Kelley keeps talking to her, at her, and Hope tries her hardest to keep listening.</p><p>Already, the details are becoming fuzzy, and Hope tries to reach for Kelley, tries to get her attention. “What … accident?” she asks weakly, knowing even as she says the words that they’re wrong. There wasn’t an accident—there was a game, wasn’t there?</p><p>Kelley reaches over, finding a place where she can touch Hope without getting in the way of the straps that hold her safe and still. “You—,” she starts, and then pauses before continuing. “There was a collision on the field, remember? Your leg got caught under the both of you as you went down, and your head hit hard on the turf.”</p><p>Hope blinks, trying to remember, but her thoughts feel thick, heavy, and it’s too hard right now. Now when she can just look up at Kelley, focus on those beautiful eyes, the familiar quirk of her smile. She almost doesn’t hear the words as Kelley continues to remind her what had happened.</p><p>“Your leg is broken,” the younger woman says, and there’s a kind of sadness in her voice that Hope has heard before, times when they’ve argued, when they’ve hurt each other, and it makes Hope want to reach out to her, to soothe away the worry. “And they think maybe you’ve got a concussion as well.” Her fingers are cool against Hope’s forehead, and she soaks up the comfort of the touch, Kelley’s presence as the sound of the siren carries them forward.</p><p>But Kelley can’t follow her into the ER, and the fear and anxiety that the younger woman’s presence had held at bay begin to overwhelm her. Everything happens so fast, or seems to, at least, after the slow, almost-leisurely way time had seemed to pass on the field, in the ambulance with Kelley keeping her calm. And the pain is seeping back in, whatever they’d given her for the initial shock of it wearing off almost all at once.</p><p>Her leg is broken, the X-RAY confirms, but the doctor hadn’t needed the result to make the diagnosis, and Hope finally understands the tone in Jim’s voice and the fear in Kelley’s eyes. It’s apparently very bad.</p><p>Sometime in-between a CT scan to determine how bad her concussion is and an MRI to see the full extent of the damage to her femur, there’s an orthopedic consult. And after several hours, a decision: surgery.</p><p>——————————–</p><p>It’s early in the game—another exhibition performance as they ramp up for Tokyo—and Kelley holds her breath on the sideline as one of the Chinese players breaks from her defender on the right and drives toward goal. But Hope does what Hope does best, and steps up, makes herself big and swoops gown for the ball.</p><p>But the attacking player doesn’t pull up. Instead, she almost seems to accelerate—even as time everywhere else seems to slow down to a crawl—sliding for the ball even as Hope wraps her arms around it, clutching it to her belly. And Kelley doesn’t have to be there in the backline to hear the sickening crunch, to feel the sharp snap of bone as Hope’s leg gives against the impact of the collision.</p><p>Her mind fills them in for her.</p><p>It’s Ashlyn’s hand that tugs at her, keeps her from stepping out onto the deep, thick grass of this perfect pitch.</p><p>“No,” the backup says softly, and like always she forgets how soft, how light, Ashlyn’s voice is. “You can’t go—you know that.”</p><p>But Kelley knows that—she knows. It’s part of the deal they have, the arrangement. They don’t mix business with pleasure. Hope on the field, that’s business. And the way Kelley feels, looking out onto the pitch, at Hope laying there with her eyes shut tight and her fists clenched white against the pain?</p><p>That’s entirely based in the pleasure side of their relationship. They might have progressed beyond secret rendesvous in hidden corners and emergency stairwells, past accidental encounters that were anything but.</p><p>But.</p><p>But still, there’s a code, unspoken, but clear.</p><p>In uniform, they’re teammates, and only that.</p><p>Except that agreement never mentioned something like this.</p><p>Ali comes over, pretending to grab a bottle of water from the sideline, and it’s clear from her face that whatever is going on, it’s bad.</p><p>“Go,” Ashlyn says, taking one look at her wife before turning back to Kelley, “go get changed. Now.” And Kelley doesn’t argue, doesn’t do anything but turn and run for the tunnel.</p><p>——————————–</p><p>Kelley rests her feet on the hospital bed, sitting back in the uncomfortable chair she dragged over to Hope’s side, a stack of discarded magazines on the rolling table next to them both. She’d paged through them all, barely paying attention as she flipped the pages, eyes and ears alert for any change in the form of the woman unconscious before her, eventually giving up all pretense of even trying to read the words.</p><p>Now she just watches Hope sleep, propping her head up on her hand as her eyes follow each rise and fall of the older woman’s chest.</p><p>It’s soothing in the oddest way—the music of the machines, the quiet buzz of activity at the nurse’s station just outside the door—and she almost misses it as she falls into a gentle half-sleep.</p><p>But there it is again—the change in the rhythm. Quicker now. Then the softest of moans, so unlike the way Hope usually wakes up. And Kelley smiles thinking of it. How the woman she loves is more likely to wake with a start, already ready to go. Nothing like this slow, gentle waking. And even though it’s come at such a cost, Kelley relishes this moment of quiet watching.</p><p>“Hey there,” she whispers, leaning forward when she can tell that Hope is finally more awake than asleep, reaching to stroke that strong, beautiful jaw. </p><p>“Welcome back.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>"In July," Sara Bareilles</p></blockquote></div></div>
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